Sunday, September 28, 2014

What does it mean to be thriving?

The methodology of the index looks like a sensible way to
assess the extent to which people are thriving in different countries. Surveys
are used to obtain subjective data relating to the following five elements:

Purpose:
liking what you do every day and learning or doing something interesting
every day

Social:
having supportive relationships - someone who encourages you to be healthy
and family and friends who give you positive energy

Financial:
having enough money to do what you want to do and not being worried about
money

Community:
liking where you live and having pride in your community

Physical:
feeling active and productive, and that your physical health is near
perfect.

When I look at the results,
however, I wonder whether the new Gallup-Healthways index actually measures the
extent to which people are thriving.

The top ten countries in the
index are as follows:

Panama

Costa Rica

Denmark

Austria

Brazil

Uruguay

El Salvador

Sweden

Guatemala

Canada.

When Scott Sumner looked at that ranking he wasn’t surprised
to see some of the countries of Latin America do well, but he was shocked to
see Sweden bracketed by Guatemala and El Salvador. His comment:

“Just to be clear, I’m NOT saying that the people in those
two countries are not just as happy as the Swedes; for all I know they are
happier. I have no idea how to measure happiness. But if you are talking
about country rankings, people are going to assume you are making some sort of
statement about socio-economic/political systems. And if a large share of
the people in these highly successful societies are risking murder, rape and
dying of thirst in order to flee to a country where they don’t speak the
language, so that they can get jobs cleaning toilets or picking vegetables in
the hot sun all day long, then I have to wonder whether these rankings actually
mean much of anything”.

Gallup’s potential net migration index suggests that large
numbers of people who live in Guatemala and El Salvador would indeed prefer to
live elsewhere. Recent surveys suggest that while about 28% of the population
of Guatemala would prefer to live elsewhere, the corresponding figure for El
Salvador is about 33%.

In Free to FlourishI
made the point that if you want to measure the quality of different societies
it makes more sense to attempt to define the characteristics of a good society
and attempt to measure the extent to which societies have those
characteristics, rather than to attempt to infer the quality of a society
solely from happiness indexes. Nevertheless, it comes as a surprise when a high
proportion of the population is assessed to be thriving in societies from
which large numbers of people wish to migrate to seek better opportunities.

When I set out to find out the reasons for the results
obtained by Gallup-Healthways my first thought was that it might reflect the
method used to rank countries. The criterion used is the percentage of the
population that are thriving on the basis of three or more of the elements
defined above. However, when I constructed an index by averaging the scores on
all five elements (giving thriving a rating of 3, struggling a rating of 2 and
suffering a rating of 1), El Salvador remained in 7th place and the
ranking of Guatemala remained fairly high (falling from 9th to 14th).

My second thought was that people would be unlikely to give
equal weight to the five specified elements in assessing the quality of their
lives. In order to assess what weights might be appropriate I used regression
analysis to explain the old Gallup thriving index in terms of the five elements
of the new index. The old Gallup index is based on the Cantril methodology
under which survey respondents are asked to evaluate their own lives relative
to the best and worst possible life. Under the old Gallup index the percentages
of the population assessed to be thriving in El Salvador and Sweden were 36%
and 68% respectively.

There is a problem with the use of regression analysis to
obtain weights because the old and new indexes relate to surveys taken years
apart, but that seemed to me to be a minor problem by comparison with use of
equal weights.

The results of the analysis suggest that it might be
appropriate to give a weighting of 40% to Purpose, 30% to Financial, 30% to
Physical, and zero weight to Social and Community. The rankings on that basis
are:

Panama

Sweden

Denmark

Austria

Costa Rica

Canada

Netherlands

Iceland

Mexico

El
Salvador

At this point I have to acknowledge that the high rating
given to El Salvador is unlikely to be a result of the methodology used for
ranking, or failure to weight elements appropriately.

No matter how I look at it, the people of El Salvador seem to be
highly positive about their lives. This is consistent with the results of other Gallup surveys which have shown that the people of El Salvador experience
a great deal of positive emotion.

The problem is that while it is good to have positive emotional states or positive states of mind, thriving involves more than that. From observed behaviour it is
obvious that humans see their ability to thrive as related to objective
circumstances such as incomes, life expectancy and education – which are
reflected in the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI) – as well as to their emotional states.

Anyone interested in identifying the countries in which
people have the best opportunities to thrive might find the following chart of
some interest.

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Emancipation

Welcome!

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There is a list of my most popular posts below. I am pleased that a post about characteristics of a good society, that I wrote in 2009, is still one of the most popular. That post captures some of the ideas about freedom and individual human flourishing that I think are most important.